Team Profile: 37signals

Our products do less than the competition —intentionally.
– the 37signals motto

37signals is a small software company based in Chicago; led by their founder, Jason Fried, and managing partner David Heinemeier Hansson. Jason and David are half-time managers at most. They spend the rest of their time creating products. Their management philosophy is that the best working environments comes when the managers are also workers.

The company has an office in Chicago, but the entire company works remotely. Only about half the staff is in the Chicago area, and they only come into the office one day a week. Everyone else is located in home offices around the United States and Europe. When David needed to work from Sweden from six months it just wasn’t a problem for the rest of the company.

37signals has a plan of not planning ahead. They don’t add new processes or tools into their team because they think they will need them later, they wait until the need is real. Many company don’t plan ahead, but few of them do it on purpose.

They also creates the tools they use. They run their company using the tools they sell. This means each tool they use was made to address a specific problem they had. They have never bought a big collaboration tool like Microsoft SharePoint just because they needed a small part.